How It Is (Comment c’est, 1961; English version 1964) by Samuel Beckett (Summary)

 

How It Is (Comment c’est, 1961; English version 1964)

by Samuel Beckett

(Summary) 

Summary

The narrator exists in darkness.

There is no clear beginning, no origin story—only mud, darkness, breath, and a body moving. He crawls endlessly through thick, sucking mud, pulling himself forward inch by inch. He carries a sack filled with tins of food. He does not know where he is or why he moves; he only knows that movement happens, and stopping feels like a kind of death.

His thoughts come in fragments, broken rhythms, half-remembered phrases. Memory does not unfold smoothly—it arrives as scraps, uncertain and unreliable. He recalls a time before the mud, or thinks he does: a world of light, of people, of words spoken normally. But these memories are unstable, possibly invented, possibly echoes of something read or heard. Nothing can be trusted fully, not even his own mind.

He crawls alone for a long time.

Then he encounters another body in the mud.

The other man is motionless at first. The narrator names him Pim, though the name feels arbitrary, as if pulled from nowhere. The narrator becomes Pim’s master—not by choice, but by position. He beats Pim to make him move, to crawl, to obey. Violence becomes communication. Pain becomes instruction. There are no explanations, only blows and reactions.

Together they form a pair: one ahead, one behind. The one behind suffers; the one ahead commands. The narrator feeds Pim from his tins, controls his movements, regulates his existence. Pim becomes a mirror of what the narrator might have been—or will become. The relationship is brutal, mechanical, ritualistic.

Yet even in this cruelty, there is dependence. The narrator needs Pim as much as Pim needs him. Without Pim, there is no structure, no role, no meaning—even if that meaning is horrific.

Eventually, Pim stops responding.

Whether from exhaustion, death, or withdrawal is unclear. The narrator beats him, waits, listens, but Pim does not return to function. The narrator abandons him and crawls on alone again, returning to solitude.

Now the narrator begins to suspect something terrifying:

This cycle has happened before.

He imagines that he was once Pim himself—beaten, dragged, commanded. And he imagines that he will become Pim again. The roles are not fixed. There is no progress, only repetition. Master and victim rotate endlessly, like positions in a nightmare with no exit.

The world seems to consist entirely of countless crawling bodies, each locked into the same pattern: crawling alone, finding another, dominating or being dominated, losing them, and crawling on again.

There is no final revelation.

No escape from the mud.

No arrival at light.

No explanation for why this system exists.

The narrator continues to crawl, continues to think, continues to speak—in broken syntax, without punctuation, without certainty—because speaking is the only proof that he still exists.

The novel ends not with closure, but with continuation. The mud goes on. The body goes on. The voice goes on.

This is how it is.

What the Story Ultimately Conveys

Though stripped of plot in the traditional sense, How It Is tells a grim, deeply human story:

Existence as endurance, not purpose

Language as a failing tool, yet the only one available

Power and suffering as cyclical, not moral

Identity as unstable, endlessly shifting between roles

Memory as unreliable, possibly fabricated

Beckett reduces life to its barest mechanics: body, pain, movement, voice.

There is no redemption—but there is persistence.